The first time I cut myself shaving,I did not know until the thin river of blood

streamed down my shin. Still, it happens the same way each time:

the disbelief that so much bloodcould spring from so little a wound.

Emily Jalloul is a Lebanese-American poet who graduated with her MFA from Florida International University. Her previous work has been published or is forthcoming in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Gravel, Juked, Origins, The FEM, as well as others. She lives in Miami, Florida.

Claire Ibarra received her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. Her poetry has appeared in many fine literary journals and anthologies, including The Midwest Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Literary Orphans. She is also a contributor to the anthology “America Is Not the World” by Pankhearst Publishing. Claire’s poetry chapbook is “Vortex of Our Affections” (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

I remember Mom threading the needle,lashing the stitch back and forth in her hands.Grandfather had just died. We found him deadon the hardwood, skin still vibrant and moist.No time to waste, Mom peeled him in long, shapely strips,then cut them into worthy squares. Grandfatherwould become a blanket, an otherwise mixed messagefor us to sleep under. Mom paid a guy$50 to dig a hole to throw him in, and another 20to cover it up. She sat around the plot making the quilt,and we sat a skirt around her while she told the story of him.Bastard, always made off on cold nights, paying for warmthhe hadn’t bothered to find right in front of him, but I promise,she said, you all will have. He won’t take that away from you,and it’ll kill him, you know, shacking up to benefit his own kin.And she was right. All those years, we had him.At bedtime, we’d pull him back from the headboard,tucking ourselves feet first before pulling him over our faces,warm as any, dreams stirring under a world whispering.

The Thawing Season

There are times when the door to Mom’s bedroomdoesn’t open. Sometimes, it lasts for months.Frost creeps from the floor tiles to the walls,but her door still burns like a furnace. What’s leftof the heat throughout the rest of the house floatsto the top. Dad shows in his red pickup. In the backare meat hooks and long lays of chicken and beef and pork.Through the door, Dad animates in black boots,an apron and rubber gloves. Before long, his frozen castof meats hangs above us. He puts a pot of water to boilon the stove and looks after us. Perhaps he’s lonely.As the door to Mom’s room cracks, the meat startsto thaw. Flies gather. The hooks and meat swayin the air above us and drip, and soften shape,and sometimes fall on us from the ceiling.We’re covered in blood, dead meats and their juiceswith our dad, and we settle in well to this routineby the time the water boils, he’s gone again.

Theo

He became our only sister. Maybe he took too muchto making Mom happy. Too much disappointmentto knowing what would but couldn’t make her happy.Back when Mom thought he would be her last baby,she told him she’d always hoped her last would be a girl.That sometimes she thought he was her girl, just bornwith the wrong parts. Still, as our brother, Theospoke out to us, said, “Sometimes when I gather the skinover my pecs and pull it toward the center of my chest,I’m convinced I have real cleavage. I could be like the girls.In the coming years my hair could fall thick, the darkestbrown curls, or I could straighten them and be beautiful.”He already had the eyelashes. We understood. We were sorry.We were sad. It was when Theo started talking like thisthat we hid him from our dad, pitched him as one of the girlsfrom down the street when he’d come in intermittentlyfrom long stretches in the open elsewhere. It was easymaking him believe us. It was hard seeing him struggleto list us all in conversation, to look us straight-facedand forget our names, call us the convenient wild things.How insignificant it must feel to have had us when we walkin miniature around him and he not know us, when we bunchin Mom’s bosom, the spread of all her ambitions hiddenbetween us.

Our Sister Theo

Theo grew his hair down to his ankles. He’d have groundhis jaw down smooth if he could. Where his arms and legswere hard, he’d lather cream to soften and make themglisten. Where his body swung at sharp angles, he’d makearcs to round them, and where his voice fell low, he raised it,but never to the kind of high he needed. His bodyonly changed short of the thing it was becoming.When is it that for another one becomes willing to changeeverything? And what of the former left sitting darkin that cold damp cellar, in that puddle of still water,dirt grown up its skin, stuck to the wall by shackles around its ankleswith the swipe of waste around its mouth to taintwhat small nutrient was last given to it? What of how it cranesits head to stare as if to ask how exactly has it been madeto feel sorry? And why?

Dustin Pearson is the author of Millennial Roost, forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2018. He earned his MFA at Arizona State University, where he also served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. His manuscript, The Wilting Tree, was a finalist for the 2017 Anhinga Press-Robert Dana Prize and the 2017 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize. He was awarded the 2015 Katharine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his poem “The Black Body Auditions for a Play.” More of his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, The Spectacle, decomP, Saranac Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Vinyl Poetry, Public Pool, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Watering Hole, Cave Canem, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Born in Charleston, he is from Summerville, South Carolina.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Her collection of lyric essays is Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Recent work appears in 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Gettysburg, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of creative writing at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

September 2017, Maria plowsa demolition path towards Puerto Rico. In her wake, the port of riches criesfor food, drinking water, medicinescontained in scorching ports, just a truck-drive, an airlift awaywhile officials plan plans and waiver. Weeks after Irma’s slap, the VirginIslands still insist, “remember us.” And Barbuda remains silent. But, in St. Martin, a teacher tells tv newsabout a saving grace in colors of earth, sky; her story pivoting epiphany.

She collects children from their playin ruin’s hush near broken cathedralsteps, stirring puddles under rainbowsarcing wastes. They will use brazenhues of yellow ochre, green, orange, red, blue—colors so loud God swaysto the splash, splatter, and smoothingstroke springing up fallen homes, schools, the church. One, whose canvasis a resurrected tent for storing schoolsupplies, echoes a zephyr of voice, so familiar it pangs, “Miss, I paintmango leaves.” He lets her see, proudof what his fingers have made: a leafpurpling to fine wine; some greenaround a brown-line tree. Her hearttakes in his passionfruit and melongiraffe, head held high in low silverspears of stratus, hooves on a coconutcurve of earth—images conjuringher son another storm stole years earlierand forever. “My son liked animals,” she tells her young muse.

Beginning her story’s end, she thinksof her child up there where the artisthas painted an apricot sun on blueheaven skies. Her muse is the lastof the children she’ll take backto the tents they call home. Lateafternoon, she's steering the boyaway from his canvas, away from her. “We will tell tamaman of your goodwork,” she says, cradling his paintedfingers, so at least for the lengthof their trek, she adds with thanks, her hand “was not empty.”

Stronger, August 2017(for Heather Heyer)

Be outraged pay attention! might have been her mantra that day.

Between twilight and a year of days, it certainly was her mother’s;

identifying her body, picking up her last pay,checking on her sick Chihuahua,

bidding “my child, farewell”—moweddown by a driver furrowing

fractured streets of Charlottesvilleto irrigate tares that angels

of our better natures, clearly discerningthem from wheat, will one day

gather for burning. Today, folkslistening above political parlance,

noisy tweets, to hear Heather’sstory, take up the mantra now.

Her fall for standing against what makesthe word “evil,” flesh, sows a seed,

against mendacity, Darwinian myths—some raised in monuments of concrete

and bronze; poised against a hydra of hate, whose spew from many heads, many

heads, gets drowned in saxophoneshumming “Amazing Grace” because,

on Heather’s day, America, rising to her finestclaimed, I am more than my troubled

history. On tonight’s real news, someone says Heather’s legacy

was born August 12th, 32-years ago.Centuries of slain say much earlier

in every defender of peace, who has been and is to come,

who has been and will be outraged, who has paid and will pay attention.

Those who centuries of "strange fruit"—andevery creed, age, color of martyr—say

are the ones who have known and will knowwhat Heather knew; the ones who

have and will bet on their very preciouslives, that truth reigns and will remain

the moral arc, often hidden, butever bending toward the right and just.

Olga Dugan is a Cave Canem poet. Her award-winning poems appear or are forthcoming in The Peacock Journal, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Kweli, The Southern Quarterly, The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, Cave Canem Anthology: XIII, Pirene’s Fountain, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Scribble. Holding a Ph.D. in Literary History from the University of Rochester, Olga is a Lindback Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.

“Some are here as refugees, some are here as citizens, some are here without papers, but they are all my people.” —Gene Wu, Member, Texas House of Representatives, USA.

Spirit of nomads,escorts of wandering caravansthrough time,guide us as we commence ourjourney to strange lands.We have waved our farewells to the wind,with our feet imprinted in river beds.We have grasped a handful of soiland poured it out to the four cornersof the earth:to the East we said “go”to the West we said “go”to the North we said “go”to the South we said “go”with the wish whispered by parentsas their children set out on a journeyof unlikely outcome.

Go before us,and may our progeniesalways remember the place of our origin.

Our children would grow up hereon foreign soil,seeing the old land as a mystic place,only spoken about in noon day talesand viewedas National Geographic episodes,and the old tongue a riddlethat needs to be solved,an arithmetical equationin a notebook without pages.

For them, this is where they belongthis is where their memories reside,this is where they have their friends,their schools, jobs, and shopping malls.

We on the other handwill make new onesas we are caressed by nostalgiaof the memories we left behind,and make up for it by trading tasteswith new ingredients for old delicacies.

Valentine Okolo is a thinker, writer, and artist. He was part of the online team of the U.K-based magazine, Know Yourself, and while it existed was art and self-expression editor. He has also served as an editor to a few other magazines as well. He is currently an editor for businessiqonline.com, the fastest and largest circulating business magazine in Africa. He tweets at @poetval.

Some of us don’t breathe the air outside the womb. Our mothers eat from cans or toil over assembly lines, waiting for men who never call. We make fists under the depth of a wondrous seawhile our mothers cup their bellies for one two or three. Those of us who breathe may circle around the sun, before our father, wherever he is, finds us like an anchor at his feet.

Eréndira's fiction appears in West Branch, The Puritan, Day One, The Cossack Review, The Black Warrior Review, Fourteen Hills, and others. Her poetry is featured in The Sunlight Press and Mothers Always Write. Her essays are featured in The Washington Post, Brain, Child Magazine, The Tishman Review, Cordella Magazine, Front Porch Commons: A Project of the [CLMP], and many others. She has work forthcoming in The Mudroom. She is writing a novel.

i told my daughter the control of the bird is a soft balling of freedom thrown back into the air one more time and she should never once discount flight happening right in front of her because that could be the last time it happens and it’s a longshot that hollow bones will last much longer in a world that has bet heavy on the idea that it can trap the sun

[each bullet]

i told my children each bullet is a promise to at least one person that they will die in a puddle that they will be turned into the sky and the fireball that consumes it that each bullet is a solar flare that laps up whole families with each slight burst that each bullet can swallow the firmament whole

[the noise ripens]

i told my son the noise ripens in your gut all you have to do is open your mouth wide enough to birth the field that can become the crop that will lift your words high enough to have a chance to be stumpled upon by a party that is searching for the almost destruction of youth and willing to settle for the shape of the story you give them so good luck son because this next ohio is all yours

Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently “Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly” (2016, 8th House Publishing). He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Driving on a Country Road at Midnight, I Summon Du Fu

Here, there, a red pulse of heat lightning. Dendrites firing within the cortex of a behemoth cloud-brain. I struggle to explain modern neuroscience to you, settling at length on a metaphorof a million tiny candles lighting & relighting one another.

Sitting beside me, the fringe of your robe is caught in the seal of the passenger door, & your moldy boots crunch on a leaf-litterof grocery store receipts. Although it is a balmy summer night in Florida,you exhale cold vapor made greenby the glow of the dashboard,& shiver, still prisoner to the damp pawof the Hunan winter that beatthe life from your flesh.

You speak to me, but I can onlyunderstand you when you recite. When the clouds part, I point out the stars, the same stars that once witnessed an old bureaucrat re-thatching his wind-scoured roof.

You shake your head. Beauty & aweare luxuries you can’t afford in death. I try to argue, but you begin reciting:

“Man is the most foolish animal,for man alone stands upright—stands only to be ground to chaff

between the twin millstonesof Earth & Sky.”

Love Poem

Sometimes I can hear you dreaming—loud as falling starlight, or a canary singing deepin the black marrow of a mountain;clear as moth’s wings in a thunderstorm,or an ant’s stomach digesting honeyten feet below ground.

On a breezy, April afternoon we stood out of breath from our climb. Daffodils thrust up in the clearing of a old home-place, leaning in clots of barren growth. We passed into an opening of disjointed boards, through a short hallway into the living-room. Mostly fallen from exposure, sun-bleached, moss-covered lumber clung together with rusted nails, corroded hinges, this hull from as far back as 1853, 1913? Only bleary photographs could show that life. Time passes. Wind slips in. We don’t see with the same eyes. Along one wall, pieces of ironwork and glass lay covered in dust, a single wasp comb where the light-bulb hung. Ceiling edges and outside sills have coiled in vine. Sparrows lodged in half-rotted walls. Leaves cluttered the floor, creaked even under her light feet as she crept toward the hearth. Those fingers worked among loose brick; each one tumbled down, each nail, with ease removed. Worn, though still intact, five or six boards of tongue-and-groove wood painted sickly ocher, now faded, chipped and peeled in places so worn the wood grain shown. Each side was carved as a pillar, straight lines cut top to bottom. The shelf was a sanded two-by-four, curved backing rounded in arcs, met mid-way, curled out on each side. We carried her mantle upside down, guided, pushed through grass, lifted over rough ground. Easing around thorns, half-way down the path, her arms grew tired, so we sat for a while on rocks beneath a stand of oak and pine. I want more than a remnant. I remember what they said to me, all of them, every word.

John Timothy Robinson is traditional and a graduate of the Marshall University Creative Writing program in Huntington, West Virginia. He has published in 39 journals since August 2016. John teaches for Mason County Schools in West Virginia. Most recent work appears in: The Magnolia Review,Tipton Poetry Journal and Plainsongs.

As in, how many more days can we camp withoutgetting killed by Alvaro, Alvaro who drinks enoughfor three, Alvaro with teeth the color of licorice.

As in, how much longer until Patagonia getsa chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous or AdulterersAnonymous, or Andes Anonymous as in, we climbup and over the Andes in every conversation.

Hard to talk about the weather when pumas fallfrom the sky, when condors and armadillos lurklike innuendos. As in, a single man is more lonelythan a guanaco macho surrounded by ten hembras.

How much further to the end of the story, the onewhere la gaucha y el gaucho ride off with a horse, one of them steering towards the ivory cliffs.

Born in Miami, Dana De Greff received her MFA in fiction from the University of Miami and is the Founder & Executive Director of PageSlayers Summer Camp, a 2016 Knight Arts Challenge Winner. She has been accepted or awarded scholarships from Tent: Creative Writing; the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop; and The Key West Literary Seminar. Her work appears in Philadelphia Stories, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere.

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, where she was a Knight Foundation Fellow. She was a finalist in the Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

EXPLAINING HAZARDS For Mia

I’m trying to write a letterto my god-daughter in Londonafter reading Between The Wordand Me and although the bookis good and true she is not black or white she is beautiful and smartand I want to warn her but notalarm her or draw a line down her as America’s constant war demands and yesterday at George W. Bush Airport in Houston after a month in Costa Rica with my doors unlocked and fair priced dentistry I felt I was walking into a maximum security prisonwith a live Trump-feed and I stoodin line with all the other tired andhungry thinking I was going to dieor at least put a part of my soul on hold cause you have to choose here one extreme or the other and don’tcross the tracks too much cause if you do mix both sides will have guns and love using them and the nearest port of entry may bebehind you although we are luckycause they stamp our passportscause our countries have moneyI’m still trying to write the letter to my god-daughter with her ownhistory and life all I can think ofsaying is go elsewhere until thingsblow up and over because theycertainly will and I don’t want youcaught in the middle your beautyis above and beyond the linesthey force us to draw and follow

David Morgan O'Connor is from a small village on Lake Huron. After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a short story collection progresses. He contributors monthly to The Review Review and New Pages. His writing has appeared in Barcelona Metropolitan, Collective Exiles, Across the Margin, Headland, Cecile's Writers, The Great American Lit Mag, Bohemia, Beechwood, Fiction Magazine, After the Pause, The Great American Lit Mag (Pushcart nomination) , The New Quarterly and The Guardian. Follow David on Twitter @dmoconnorwrites or visit his website: davidmorganoconnor.com

Once, when I was a teenager, I caughta man bending over in a long string

of sneezes. An older woman leaned closeand said, You can always tell how a man

will be in bed by how he sneezes.After that, I couldn't help myself:

I'd think: he makes that exact expressionwhen he comes. I'd never waste my time

talking to any man who suppressed his sneezes.One of the earliest motion pictures

made for the Edison Kinetoscope showeda man take a pinch of snuff,

and the resulting sneeze. You'd watch itthrough a peephole: 81 frames

of involuntary bodily contortions.Seen in slow motion, it appears that Fred Ott

has a religious revelation:beatitude, oblivion, explosion.

People paid to see this:they called it entertainment.

BURBOT lota lota

The burbot is a long thin fish.Todd calls it an eelpout and curses its name;it steals the bait he intends for walleyes,it wraps around his arm when he releasesthe hook, its teeth are numerous and sharp,

and its beard, the single barbel, odd. He curses it and throws it back.The French call it river codand poach the liver in white wine and make patecalled foix de lotte de rivière. Alaskans

call it ling cod and bake it whole; chefs prizeits flakes of tender white flesh. I’ve never tasted the fish.Todd shows me photos on his phone:he wants to brag about his tricked-out

ice-fishing shack with its large-screen TVand all the walleyes he catches.Everyone in Wisconsin, he insists,hates the eelpout. Turns out it’s the onlyfreshwater fish in the cod family.

Was it separated from its salty kinby continental shift, by some earlyunmarked cataclysm? The burbot is the onlyfreshwater fish to spawn in winter, at the same time as saltwater cod.

Burbots rise each winter from the depthsfor a shallow orgy, sometimes a hundred or moreintertwined bodies in a quivering ball, releasing eggs and sperm, churningbeneath a blanket of ice.

are embedded there,coated in a tough blackperiostracum.Inside her shell,Ming shone like the moon.

Photo by Mig Dooley

Kim Roberts’s fifth book of poems, The Scientific Method, was released from WordTech Editions in February 2017. She is the co-editor of the journals Beltway Poetry Quarterly and the Delaware Poetry Review, and editor of the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC (Plan B Press, 2010). Her book of walking tours, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC from Frances Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston, will be published in Spring of 2018 by the University of Virginia Press. Roberts is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, HumanitiesDC, and the DC Commission on the Arts, and has been a writer-in-residence at 15 artist colonies.

So as not to wake youI unzipped just enoughto slide my handpast the hard shellof the suitcaseAs I feltI forgotthat all I wantedwas a notebooka penand socksto go for a walkI made out the outlineof the buttonson your father’s shirtand the clean solesof the high heelsI know I’ll never wearthen twirled my fingersaround shoelacesyou can’t yet tieand sailed my hands overthe smooth plasticof a shipto which I didn’t hold the keyI cupped a sleeping lionstroked its manepried open its mouthand as I feltits plush little teethtake a nip at meyou shiftedand I laid the animalback on its pillow of t-shirtswithout a roarand when you reachedwith your little boy handtowards the space beside youI was already back theresucking on the tiny spotof blood on my index fingerand adjusting the blanketthat kept ustogether

Ananda Lima’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Offing and is to appear in LIGO Magazine and The Heavy Feather Review. She holds an MA in Linguistics from UCLA, was selected an AWP Writer to Writer mentee and has attended workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Tin House. Ananda is currently working on a novel set in Brasilia, where she grew up as the daughter of migrants from Northeast Brazil, as well as a poetry collection centered on identity in immigration and motherhood. Find her at http://www.anandalima.com.

On the mudflats of a vast Caribbean lagoon on the Orinoco Delta coast a tight standing flock of common stilts face an east wind, the ones behind step ahead pushing the front ones forward

Each morning’s first frigatebirds fill the huge eastern proscenium minutes before sunrise

In graceful Venezuela, little kids on the street doing the samba in place, the sliding lane-shift flow of a Caracas freeway, frigatebirds soaring over long coasts, trucks lurching down red-earth mountain tracks, the Orinoco

Iberoamérica. Venezolana, venezolano

Piña, papaya, caraotas negras, arepas de maíz, queso blanco y café

It is glorious to be at the top of the immense vertical continent with the ability to drive off south through the equatorial double tropic into the far, ocean-bound cold exterior pendant peninsula of Patagonia approaches a Paris-to-Beijing Eurasian scale

Study in awe the huge scaly yellow legs and talons of a common black hawk waiting like a dark Madonna in a shrine in the shroud of a mangrove over a roadside tidal pool

Stunned in the presence of a harpy eagle on perch, an avenging angel almost a meter high, head ruffed and bushy, divided crest that goes hornlike when erect, thighs barred black, massive tarsi, bare, its black chest patch clearly visible, tail marbled and barred with black

The nearly omnipresent caracaras, abrupt and crazy like few beings in nature and barely more than half the size of harpy eagles, plunge around flying low off from roadkills

Their facial skin color changes from orange to bright yellow when excited

Bound for caracas spilling from its high mountain valley with over six million people

Caraqueñas, caraqueños

In Nueva Esparta on a red-earth mountain cutbank above the sea, mushrooms appear one night like smooth-cap parasols (Leucoagaricus naucina), frosted silvery so white as to glow in the false dawn

A buffy hummingbird singing nearby in first light flies off, flies back in and begins again to sing, can see her tinier tongue when she opens her tiny beak

Before the sun is up, another buffy hummingbird and a female ruby-topaz in an arroyo farther along the hillside

Search for the ruby-topaz male, crown feathers to the nape glittering ruby red, back dark olive brown, throat and upper breast glittering topaz orange, a tuft of down white feathers on the flanks, tail rufous chestnut tipped black, insect size at three and a half inches long

But either the ruby-topaz male is not here, or if he is somewhere in the acres of steep hillside brush, when looking one way he is behind, when looking left he is right, when looking back behind he is foreground low in front

One bushy tropical hillside, a big place for one darting hummingbird

Eighty-six species of colibries, tucusitos, and chupaflores in Venezuela

Their families, the Sunangels, the Pufflegs, the Brilliants, the Lancebills, the Violetears, the Mangos, the Sabrewings, the Starfrontlets, the Coquettes, the Woodstars, the Emeralds, the Goldenthroats, the Sapphires, the Hermits, the Barbthroats, the Hummingbirds

In the straits skirting the Isla Coche bound for Cumaná, a pomarine jaeger half a meter long, yellow eyed close off the rail

Flies with us there for half a minute, its twisted spoon-shaped tail streams unmistakably, hulk gliding singularity, the great circumpolar skua that ranges here in winter

An opportunistic voracious jaeger like that in sight of the coast of Sucre state’s canyons and mountainsides all resplendent with nectar-sipping hummingbirds is as amazing and as wild as anything on earth

Walking from the ferry slip in Cumaná

The city still full of Cumanagoto faces

The elegant Tainos were Arawakan brothers of the Cumanagotos, who except for language were gone in a lifetime after Columbus hit, every Taino on the planet dead within fifty years of 1492

Ten years after Columbus came, Bartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispañola and started a model Indian community in Cumaná

His magnum opus, Historia de las Indias, was not even published until 1875 in Spanish

Like a nineteenth century humanist, he preached against Indian slavery and medieval Spanish free-booting lust and greed, Catholic colonial issues that people still argue about

Ask the car rental guy, an old ballplayer, about Las Casas and he grins, points to his face, “¡Cumanagoto, cumanagoto, cumanagoto!”

Against the sun going down in salt-coast haze an alpomado falcon, Falco femoralis, hunting high over a yellow grass bajada with its white-barred blackish tail obvious in the indirect light, hovering there it looks twice as large as a kestrel

In the same feeding flock within a mangrove swamp beside a Radio Sucre transmitter, a male prothonotary warbler, brilliant yellow, brilliance as emphatic as Bartolomé de Las Casas seeing his god in Indian slaves’ eyes

Climb the first mountain pass on the way west to Caracas, a waved woodpecker’s hatchet-shaped head shows up over a switchback hammering on a tree-size cactus, woodpecker speckling, red cheek and ear patch back toward its nape, Celeus undatus

Yellow earth impure yellow ocher on the headlands and mountains above the bays

Oxide yellow is yellow ocher on the cutbanks and bare rock-face passes headland to headland down along

A hundred kilometers west in colonial Barcelona’s numbered-street barrio grid with wrought iron grills and sixteenth century carved hardwood doors

A rock guitar mass going on at dusk in Barcelona’s big white early-Baroque cathedral on the plaza Boyacá, a quiet square encircled by high elegant patios, blue-screened TVs inside high windows

Evening coastal glow off the Paseo Colón in adjoining Puerto La Cruz and dinner thereat a big bright parrilla managed by a homesick Peruvian from Lima who talks Sendero Luminoso, Brazil, and goes on about Lima like a New Yorker about New York

In the dawn from a river bridge west of Barcelona watch yellow-shouldered parrots flying out from roosts in twos and threes turning their heads toward one another on the wing, talking away

Greenlets, seedeaters, a plumbeous kite, a smooth yellow-headed caracara lifts off fast away from the river bank with a thin brown and black snake in its talons and see three green kingfishers working riparian territories a tenth the size of what North American kingfishers claim

Píritu’s colonial buildings and blue woodwork along the coast, its parks and trees laid out below long hills, Laguna de Unare on sand tracks to Boca de Uchire, stilts, dowitchers, spotted sandpipers, five kinds of herons

Scarlet ibises rising and then disappearing behind big mangroves

Empty sand flats, double-striped thick-knees, and stone curlews that are often kept in semi-domesticity around Venezuelan homesteads to keep the insects down

Into Miranda State where not only the river canyons but everything is green

Hamlets become like villages, villages like strip mall towns, approaching the capital where one quarter of all Venezuelans live

The freeway up to El Marques at the eastern lip of the city’s mountain bowl and on in down the urbanized high valley

Massive highrise cityscape, nearly a thousand meters above sea level

Pico Ávila in the range between Caracas and the sea overlooks everything from over two thousand meters over all that city, all that green

On the trails back down off the summit the green jays seem to follow, bold peeking and prying in and out of the foliage almost all the way back down into the city

D. E. Steward, writes serial month-to-month months of which “Los pájaros” is one. This Chroma project was begun in 1986 and continues unbroken. He has 364 of these calendar months with more than two-thirds published. The first six years of them are in press as Chroma I (Archae Editions, 2017) with further volumes to follow.

i initially think we fight out of hunger,because she looked for the pills and i put them in the oven.i had to take care of my mother at 14when she cried like alice.we reached el yunque’s peakto see only water and wind.

i have a list of reasons in my bag.reasons to hate yourself and all others by extension:

first reason:my father has cancer. the same father who would vote for trump, if he wasn’t puertorriqueño, but he is puertorriqueño, like his cancer, his very puertorriqueño cancer.

fifth reason:

here my friends hoard hormones,there my friends spent years stealing from the state that stole theirresources, which don’t exist.

twelfth reason:

i feel rage towards my white friends, who don’t care about the imposition of the control board, for whom this is the first dictatorship. i’m crying at them the rage i feel toward my gf, but i let it go because i’m worried about their sweetness.

miscellaneous reasons:

i can’t breathe in basements.the codified letters are to be read with a metronome.this chest//rage//discordant ink.fascism isn’t new. fascism lived in condado. fascism pushed my face into the sand when it reached our beaches.who cares is fascism’s motto.who cares if the minimum wage goes down in puerto rico.who cares if all your people die slowly.fascism is so not-new, that i don’t know the differencebetween the rage i feel and the rage i felt.

i fight with my gf because she opened the window and it was cold. i fight with her because it’s cold and i’m not in puerto rico.i fight with her because the lamplight is too strong. i fight with her because it isn’t the río piedras sun.

the fascists want us dead.neither one of us says it because it’s obvious,like saying capitalism is the root of all our problems.it’s so obvious we forget,or we want to forget because destroying it feels impossible,when barely living is too much.

i fight with my girlfriend because she forgets my boricua friend’s nameand because i’m tired.i self-medicate with poems.i do rebirth rituals.i fight with her because i love too much for these times,because love is an elemental resource,but never as elemental as self-defense,which is the most love of all the loves.

we fight because it’s 12,because a day doesn’t pass where we aren’t afraid,because all the cross streets read enemy,because any white man could be armed,because i am boricua and they record my conversations,because she is jewish and carries numbers in her blood,because the fascists are organized to kill us.these are obvious things, things we know,things that reverberate.

many theorists say trauma is time out of joint.the audiotrack speeddoesn’t match the images.my mouth also doesn’t say what my face wants;the words come out too fast and hurtful, as if it didn’t recognize her.i think trauma is more like they put the audiotrack on another series, as if i spoke for herand she spoke for the fascists.it’s so obvious those aren’t her wordsit’s so obvious, like sayingcapitalism is the root of all our problemsor we can’t fight if we are dead.

Raquel Salas Rivera has published poetry and essays in numerous anthologies and journals. In 2011, their first book, Caneca de anhelos turbios, was published by Editora Educación Emergente. In 2016, their chapbook, oropel/tinsel, was published by Lark Books & Writing Studio, and their chapbook huequitos/holies was published by La Impresora. Currently, they are a Contributing Editor at The Wanderer. If for Roque Dalton there is no revolution without poetry, for Raquel there is no poetry without Puerto Rico. You can find out more about their work at raquelsalasrivera.com.

Origins Journal is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of Origins Journal must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law.